Yeah, Skywind is still in progress too, and I feel like I read a similar article about that three or four years ago. I'd be surprised to see either mod complete before, I dunno, 2020, or the next round of mainline Elder Scrolls/Fallout games.

(and that's assuming they don't start to wander into grey legal territory the moment they start porting over voice assets)

But the work they've done so far getting the New Vegas character progression and faction/karma systems working is pretty sweet. I've long been thinking "goddamn I wanna play New Vegas again but it's so fucking old in a lot of very annoying ways that no amount of modding will completely cure" so slapping all the NV stuff on 4's engine is kinda all I want at this point.

But I can see like hundreds of ways mods like these could break things, if not by bugs than by some lack of finesse. Fiddling with this much dialogue is maybe just asking for trouble unless the mod author just happens to also be a skilled and insightful editor.

Oh yeah, you wouldn't want to make Fallout 4 a broken, bug-riddled mess or anything.

Generally, if such a mod is *complete*, you have a good chance of having a fairly stable experience. Otherwise, yeah, it's a lot of potholes just waiting for you to fall into. Or at best, weirdly unsatisfying because the changed content will be so concentrated to only some aspects.

I've started playing Fallout 4 again, with mods. Part of me wants to stream my playthrough while talking or something, but then I figured it'd attract the weirdos who don't believe that girls can/should play video games....

Yeah that's always a risk, especially if you're playing a relatively popular game like Fallout 4. Like if JBL was a lady I feel like his audience wouldn't change much because obscure games can be hard to find in twitch's interface.

Having said that, if you did stream we'd be there and back you up and kick the scrubs.

Some folks have even used voice modulators to help avoid the toxicity, which should never be necessary, but here we are I guess.

Yeah, we'd keel haul those haters. I have heard though that limiting Twitch chat even slightly can prevent some of the douchiest haters from bothering. But I haven't really taken a look at the chat settings yet.

I'm with you on this, though I still have a soft spot for the silence of Gordon Freeman, how everyone talks to him like he's the smartest guy in the room but he could be a sponge with guns just as easily.

That's just the F3 total conversion mod though, so maybe the New Vegas folks will keep going.

Sometimes I wonder if mods like these shutter themselves not just to ward off potential legal action but also maybe 'cause they know something the rest of us don't regarding Bethesda's possible remaster plans or something. An official F3 remaster (or probably closer to a remake if it does what this mod was attempting) would be really cool, but like the mod, I still dunno if I'd wanna play this story again, having already gone through it several times on multiple platforms.

as I type this 139,000 people are currently watching a looped image of a Vault Boy bobblehead in front of a "please stand by"

Fallout 3 is 10 years old this year so this could be teasing a remaster/remake of that, probably built on Fallout 4's engine. It still feels too early for a Fallout 5, but who knows, they could announce it at E3 and not release it for years if they wanted. But I always figured they'd settle into an alternating Scrolls/Fallout release pattern, so...

I guess another non-numbered game like New Vegas is possible just probably not coming from Obsidian this time as those cats seem way too busy for it right now. Also this, whatever they mean by this

Whatever the new hotness is, it's called Fallout 76, and we'll be seeing it at E3.

Thoughts... it looks like a full-scale game and not another Shelter or something, or it at least could be a smaller game running on what looks like Fallout 4's engine. It's not numbered as Fallout 5, so it could be a New Vegas-y unnumbered sequel.

The setting is (probably) West Virginia unless they chose that song for some other raisin. That places it very close to the Capital Wasteland - in fact, the Fallout Wiki tells me Vault 76 was mentioned in Fallout 3's terminals. The Wiki entry might be a little spoilery so keep that in mind, though said minor setting spoilers might explain why it looks the way it does in this teaser.

Some of the stuff in the teaser makes me wonder about timeline positioning, like maybe the number has a double meaning. Some other folks are speculating that maybe this whole thing is an expansion of F4's workshop stuff into a full game, and I can see that given the wording of the dialogue and stuff like "reclamation day" banners.

If we don't also see an F3 remaster or other product called Anniversary at E3 then that supposed Nintendo thing is most likely fake.

Yup, I've been hearing that too. I'd rather have a new unnumbered sequel/spinoff like NV no matter who's writing it but Fallout 76 as a limited multiplayer survival game could have some potential and I'd at least might be more into that than Shelter 2 or something.

It'll all depend on the details I guess. The teaser concepts and assumptions + the Vault 76 wiki entry makes me imagine something more like Fallout 4's workshop systems expanded into a full city management game. Something would have to go kinda sideways in the story setup to turn it into Rust.

But if the year this is supposedly set in is correct this could still be kinda interesting if only 'cause it would predate everything we've seen before and maybe give us more of a wilder wasteland to play in.

If I'm in it for anything, it's the setting and whatever bits of lore stuff gets peppered around and snuck into the margins, and folks are finding some pretty surprising details in this trailer and elsewhere in the full presentation.

First, obvious things...

- This is a much more lush wasteland than we've seen previously (outside of Point Lookout or Far Harbor anyway) and while there's definitely ruins and desert-y sections, there's also a lot of heavy overgrowth, and I dig this combination. It makes sense to me both because of its super early position in the timeline and 'cause, c'mon, this is West Virginia, yeah? Maybe not the most target-rich environment in nuclear war.

- A lot, or maybe all, of the wildlife in this trailer and the gameplay presentation is new, and kinda fuckin' scary looking, maybe more disfigured than the norm for Fallout. Maybe the radiation is still strong enough at this point that the animals of this period are more fucked than they become decades/centuries later. Or maybe that's just West Virginia y'all!

- Recognizable locations and landmarks (to folks from the area anyway, definitely not to me): Camden Park, which people are saying is a death trap with or without a nuclear war; the Greenbrier which was apparently an actual fallout shelter; the New River Gorge Bridge... among others. It'll be a big map - four times Fallout 4's - which makes me wonder about density.

Less obvious things... I'll spoiler tag these, even if it's all just speculation.

Spoiler :

The Pip-Boy, while still wrist-mounted like F3 onwards, appears to be styled much closer to the original as seen in F1/2.

Apparently, at least one of the new animal-things is straight out of the old Interplay "Van Buren" concept art. Specifically, a giant fleshy golem-like thing which the Van Buren design docs called a Gahenna.

Also from Van Buren, that wrecked hoop-shaped structure in one part of the trailer kinda resembles the BOMB-001 satellite, but I dunno, that one's a fairly basic shape, could be anything else really. Maybe. Hmm. Kinda weird for something like that to just be laying around though. Huh.

...but the West-Tek bag in the big expensive collector's edition also harkens back to pre-Bethesda Fallout lore, so... who knows? Who knows. Who knows.

- the SPECIAL system is still in. I wonder what form it'll take this time. I imagine some parts of it will need to be adjusted or totally reworked to account for the lack of certain gameplay elements and the addition of new ones. Charisma and related skills, for instance; mapping those to an online game sounds like an interesting design challenge.

- mods will in, but not at launch. This feels to me like they're going all Creator's Club on this one, which... is probably the only way it could ever work for an online game, actually.

- player characters will be mute again, but that doesn't necessarily eliminate the possibility of dialogue options.

- as others have observed (and even crunched some numbers for speculation), a map four times the size of Fallout 4's should work out to be almost 40km, which feels like quite a lot of space for a server instance containing only "dozens" of players. So... either solo or in a group, it should probably be possible to wander off and have a chill time exploring if you really want to? I'm not sure how that number compares to other survival games like DayZ or Rust, but apparently Skyrim was about the same size, which, huh, I kinda never realized Skyrim's map was that large despite playing it for hundreds of hours.

My interest in this game will depend on how shitlord the creation club items are, and whether or not I can keep randos out of my world. I wouldn't mind playing with you guys, probably be fun actually, but I don't want random assholes wrecking my shit.